Pluskylang Great Film overall

GazerRise Fantastic!

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

JohnHowardReid Producer: Lazar Wechsler. Copyright 31 March 1948 by Loew's International Corp. Preliminary copyright applied for by Loew's, Inc. A production of Praesens-Film, Zurich, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. New York opening at the Victoria: 23 March 1948. U.S. release: 6 August 1948. U.K. release: 1 May 1950. Australian release: 17 March 1949. 9,450 feet. 105 minutes. NOTES: Partly photographed in the U.S. Occupied Zone of Germany, through the courtesy of the U.S. Army and the I.R.O Only film of child actor Ivan Jandl, who received a special Hollywood award for "the outstanding juvenile performance of 1948". Number 3 on the National Board of Review's list of the Ten Best Films of 1948. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times also selected The Search as one of his Ten Best Films of the year. The movie took excellent money on domestic release, but failed to ignite the British box-office. In the rest of Europe, however, The Search chalked up such huge receipts, it topped the list of M-G-M's most commercially successful releases of the year. Australia followed the British pattern. Despite super-enthusiastic reviews, the movie took only fair money in the cultural centers of Sydney and Melbourne, with absolutely dismal takings elsewhere - even in Brisbane, the so-called "home of M-G-M". COMMENT: This film, made in its entirety in Europe in 1947, presents a number of parallels with another Zinnemann film, The Men (1950): both deal with the after-effects of war; both are virtually documentaries, with fictional elements added; and both use professional and non-professional actors very effectively. The Search tells the story of a little boy, Karel Malik, who has been separated from his family in a concentration camp. Now that the war is over, the United Nations is trying to restore these thousands of displaced children to their parents. But Karel's experiences have left such a mark on him that he has forgotten everything about his earlier life, including his name and nationality. The UNO authorities decide to transfer him to a welfare camp, but en route Karel escapes and wanders around the rubble of Berlin. At the same time, Mrs Malik is going from one bureau to another seeking information on Karel, the only member of the family who may still be alive. Despite discouragements and failures, she finally arrives at the camp from which Karel has escaped. The film was shot on location among the ruins and rubble of Germany, and in the offices and depots of UNO. The actual direction, however, is characterized by Zinnemann's attractive sensibility, his quick feeling for moods and situations and unobtrusive use of natural backgrounds. The first reel is somewhat marred by a sentimental commentary, which Zinnemann says was included at the insistence of the producers; he wanted to remove it, but was unable to do so. As a whole, the film brings home very forcefully the full horror of war; but there are two individual scenes which stay long in the mind. The first is the sequence in which the children are being given their preliminary interviews: children of 7-10, in all the languages of Europe, tell unemotionally of gas ovens and tortures. The second occurs when the children are ready to be taken to UN welfare camps. They are about to be put into trucks bearing Red Cross symbols; they refuse to enter, remembering that the Nazis took people to gas chambers in such vans. When they are at last persuaded to enter and the trucks move off, stray fumes from the exhaust penetrate the back compartment, and the children panic. Nothing is seen but their faces full of fear, and their hands clawing to break down the doors. These two scenes render the atmosphere of war-time Europe in a way that a thousand books and lectures could never do. The professional actors underplay with quiet assurance, and help invest the film with its air of actuality. Aline MacMahon is admirable as the harassed UN welfare officer, humane and realistic, trying to cope with the task of mending broken lives; Montgomery Clift, in his first screen appearance, acts with likeable charm; and young Ivan Jandl (as Karel Malik), despite the fact that his voice is dubbed by an English-speaking child, plays naturally and unaffectedly. The material of The Search is grim, yet it assiduously avoids moralizing of the Divided Heart school. There are no messages, no hopeful prophecies for the future, simply a straightforward reportage on the European tragedy. For this movie, Zinnemann won the first Screen Directors Guild Award.

michaelstep2004 I first saw this unique film at age 9 or 10 on New York City TV (1956-57). I was completely thrilled and overwhelmed, although personal experience may have played a role -- I had many unhappy separations from my emotionally disturbed mother as a child, and really identified with the character played so magnificently by the young Ivan Jandl. But I also fell in love with Montgomery Clift, an intense boyhood crush for this wonderful "dad" which remains undimmed to this day because of his remarkably empathetic and generous portrayal here. This is 1948, and Monty was still almost a child -- but was he EVER better? And the rest of the cast is just superlative, especially the heartrending, utterly inspiring Jarmila Novotna, a great and famous Czech opera singer who also made a few movies.Make no mistakes -- this is a low budget movie with few frills. Technically, it is primitive compared to better-financed Hollywood projects of the time. But in addition to the great stuff referenced above, it is a remarkable look at immediately-postwar Germany, and a touching reminder of an idealistic American Dream that seems no longer to exist.Be assured, people: among those great movies people call Must See, "The Search" is a biggie. Find it, and love it!

dbdumonteil I have to search my memory to find a movie where there is such a magic chemistry between a man and a little boy;they say Monty Clift used to rewrite his lines before the shoot.To write that he gave it his all is to diminish the thespian because there was always more to give .All his scenes -and it takes 40 minutes before he appears- are simply sensational.It makes you want to see (or as far as I'm concerned see again) all his other movies from " the heiress" and " a place in the sun" to "the misfits " "Freud " and my personal favorite "Suddenly last summer".to think that it was his debut on the silver screen! That said ,the first part of the movie ,which is Cliftless ,is by no means uninteresting;on the contrary ,it depicts,in a documentary way,the return of the children from the concentration camps ,and their fear of the uniforms ,of the ambulances (and the red cross on it).And let's not forget Jarmila Notvona as the mother hoping against hope and the always reliable Aline McMahon as the humane Mrs Murray.Some will say it's full of finer feelings but it's full of humaneness too.

Steffi_P In the years following World War 2, stories about reconstruction and readjustment were popular with filmmakers, although they were somewhat hit-and-miss with the public, who at the time would accept nothing less than full understanding and sincerity on so sensitive a subject. Even viewed today, they are a bit of a mixed bag, and many seem to have been made with the best intentions but with naiveté in their presentation. The Search is one of these.The bare plot of the Search is kind of poignant-postwar-story-by-numbers. That's not such a bad thing in itself - often the simplest ideas are the best. Even its basic structure is a good balance, beginning with an objective exposition of the plight of children in war-ravaged Europe, allowing the Ivan Jandl character to emerge from the group, then parallelling his mother's desperate search with his own psychological recovery. I don't think the Oscar for Best Original Story was deserved but I can certainly understand it.The trouble is in the screenplay as it is written. Much of the scripted dialogue is bland and trite, and the way characters react in certain situations seems false - for example, the British UNRRA officer prompting Mrs Malik to keep questioning the Jewish boy even after she has suffered the shock of his not being her son. The very worst thing is the twee voice-over narration, which elaborates every point, regardless of whether it is already obvious or even necessary to know, in the most patronising tone imaginable. Perhaps the intention was to make these early scenes less confusing and threatening to child viewers - but other than its protagonist being a child, there is nothing to suggest that this picture is especially aimed at kids. And really, without the narration we would have been left with a more genuinely childlike view of the story. This is especially true of the flashback scene of Karel Malik's family - a young child would remember this time not so much in the adult context of where the city was or what his father did for a living, but more as a series of images. Imagine how much more powerful this scene could have been if we were to experience it the same way.Almost predictably, the director is Fred Zinnemann. This man would later do some great things, but his job on the Search is rather amateurish. I think his biggest problem here is failing to show things from the point of view of the child. In those early scenes we only see the rescued youngsters from the perspective of the UNRRA officers. We see that these kids are confused and daunted by their new guardians, but I feel truly great directing would have allowed us to share this feeling. Even in those cramped and crowded trucks the camera remains aloof above the children, rather than among them. And this from a director who tended to overuse point-of-view shots in his early pictures. The only thing I like about Zinnemann's direction here is the stark realism he gives to the ruined city, and the way he keeps this sense of a desolate environment at the forefront.I am glad to say it is the cast who make the best effort at rescuing this picture. Montgomery Clift gives a wide-ranging and naturalistic performance, but probably his best contribution is that he apparently improvised much of his own dialogue, making his scenes stand out above the turgid mess of the rest of the picture. Young Ivan Jandl gives an excellent performance for a child player. You can see that there is a lot of himself in the role, but that he is also clever enough to think about what he is doing and really put effort into acting. However the real treat here for aficionados of classic Hollywood is Aline MacMahon, who was busiest as a comic supporting player at Warners in the early 1930s. In the Search she is supremely dignified, even without makeup.The way things are in the Search is the way things often were for smaller productions in the postwar era. The studio system was weakened and the majors often found themselves collaborating with independent producers. Hollywood was not the well-oiled machine it had been in the 1930s, and we got teams where not everyone was on the same wavelength. The Search is one of the unfortunate collisions of this period, between arty-farty pretensions and Hollywood gloss.